Archive for the ‘Magento’ Category

Here at Web Design GM we have developed many e-commerce websites for clients who have vast quantities of products they want to import on their new Magento website. The trouble with the native Magento import and export feature is that if you are importing over a 500 products then you may have issues with the following:

Edit the .htaccess file and increase the PHP memory.

Products may take a long time to upload.

Reindexing can take forever if you have loads of products in Magento.

If the format of the of a particular product in the .CSV is incorrect then none of the products will be imported until the format of all of the products in 100% correct.

You need to map the columns exactly how Magento likes to imports products there is no flexibility and it is very rigid and frustrating that they have not addressed this issue.

You can not import images so if you have 1000′s of products then you would have to manually upload images to all of the products.

You can not create categories on the fly or attributes so you will have to either create them programatically or manually create them which can take forever if you have many categories or attributes to create.

Fortunately for everyone we have a something which can help with all of the above and some. Sebastien Bracquemont aka Dweeves has developed a software which has really changed the way we import or export products. is a software which is extracted to the root of your Magento folder and it accesses your database and imports products at “lighting speeds”. Some of Magmi’s feature are the following:

We recently had a client approach us and request that they want a navigation on the sidebar of every page of their new Magento shop. At first we thought this would be very easy to add and take a few hours to download a plugin and have the categories push to every page. We soon established they wanted the layered navigation to be present on the homepage and then filter through all of the attributes.

Unfortunately Magento does not allow this to happen and there are many plugins out there that charge a fortune for something which is relatively easily to do. We are going show you how to get the layered navigation to any of your CMS pages and how to give it a cool and sexy accordion effect using jQuery. There are a lot of forums which have this type of post but none of them work as well as this nor do they have an accordion effect too. This has been tested on Magento 1.5

The first step is to navigate yourself to your CMS pages in the backend and update the XML file for your home page. This can be done by going to:

Replace the category ids etc to match yours. This navigation should push through all of your attributes and all of you categories as well. The rest is up to you how you style it, if you have any question please comment on our blog thanks.

At Morgan Creare we have long been awaiting the launch of the latest Magento Community Edition release, Magento 1.7.

The Magento team promised useful feature upgrades as well as a round of updates and of course reliability and performance improvements on the previous 1.6 version.

Here are three new features to watch out for:

EU Cookie Restriction

Magento have provided an in-built Cookie notification feature to ensure users keep inline with the recent EU Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive. When this handy little feature is activated a message appears at the top of the screen informing users that about the companies cookie policy and asks for the user to either accept or decline the cookie.

To enable CAPTCHA for the front end navigate to System > Configuration > Customers > Customer Configuration > CAPTCHA

Change the drop down box for ‘Enable CAPTCHA on Frontend’ to yes.

Scheduled Backup

There is now a really simple and effective way of ensuring that your Magento store is backed up. With this new function there is no excuse not to make regular backups.

You can select the frequency of your backups, this can be set to daily, weekly or monthly intervals. You now also have the option to put the store into maintenance mode whilst the backup is taking place, ensuring that your potential customers are aware of why your store is temporarily unavailable.

Today here at Web Design GM are going to discuss how to add sample or tester products to your Magento shops. There are many old tutorials which are out of date and simply do not work. We have tested this solution with Magento version 1.5 and 1.7. Free sample products or free tester products are ideal for e-commerce websites that require giving their customers for example tester materials or sample perfumes for instance.

You can restrict the amount of free sample products you want give out to your clients because you do not want people to have let’s just say a 100 free sample products. instead this tutorial will restrict the sample product to 5 but you can edit the code you change it to whatever you feel is the right amount.

1. Firstly you will need to create a file called getSample.php in the root of your Magento installation folder and populate it with the following code.

The above code is simply the function which will create sample products for you on the fly. Also not that in this example we have assigned each sample product with a ridiculous weight because the client offered the sample product and the shipping of the sample products for free meaning we had to create a table rate for the shipping method which did not interfere with the other shipping logic so that anything that exceeds 21212121 will have free shipping.

2. Next you will need to create a button where you want people to add a free sample product in the shopping basket. I have placed my sample button in the list.phtml and placed the button in both my list view and grid view.

By default, Dreamweaver cannot display PHTML files correctly. You will notice that if you open a PHTML file it will be in black and white, making it harder to edit. So if you use Dreamweaver to develop your websites and would like to be able to view Magento’s PHTML files then you can follow some simple steps to allow Dreamweaver to display the files correctly for easier editing. (more…)

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